Ann Satterthwaite

Ann Satterthwaite, longtime Georgetown resident, who played an instrumental role in founding Georgetown Waterfront Park, died September 20, 2025 at age 94. For 65 years, she worked as an urban and environmental planner based in Washington, DC, devoted to making U.S. communities more livable, sustainable, and civically engaged.

In her quest to preserve the public's access to the waters of the Potomac, Ann co-founded three citizen action organizations over three decades: the Committee for Washington's Waterfront Parks, the Georgetown Waterfront Park Commission, and Friends of Georgetown Waterfront Park. A similar desire to protect the parks and landscapes of Frederick Law Olmsted from neglect and development led to her co-founding the National Association of Olmsted Parks, today's Olmsted Network. She worked to revitalize parks and green spaces across Washington, DC as a board member of Washington Parks and People.

Speaking, teaching, and consulting projects from the federal to the local level took her around the country. The Appalachian Trail Conservancy is still guided by her bold vision of an extensive greenway stewarded by rural landowners, communities, and government together, miles of protected fields, forests, and waterways flanking the footpath from Maine to Georgia. Ann was a participant in the Committee for 100 on the Federal City and the National Preservation Institute's Planning Roundtable. In later life, as a founding board member of Georgetown Village, she helped support older residents who wished to age in their homes by forging connections between neighbors.

Luxury retail's transformation of central city neighborhoods led to her first book "Going Shopping: Consumer Choices and Community Consequences," Yale University Press, 2001. In subsequent decades, the repurposing of historical, small-town opera houses across America gave rise to "Local Glories: Opera Houses on Main Street, Where Art and Community Meet," Oxford University Press, 2016. Her final project was an update of Kathryn Schneider Smith's history "The Georgetown Waterfront" for Posterity Press, 2022.

Ann sculpted in metal, wood, and stone, her artwork punctuating her home and garden. She enjoyed canoeing on the Potomac, attending talks at the Cosmos Club, hiking with members of the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club, and exploring vernacular and designed places in Great Britain and the U.S.

Raised in Englewood, NJ, by Margaret Howard Post (Speer) Satterthwaite, a journalist and landscape photographer, and J. Sheafe Satterthwaite, a national authority on financing public projects, Ann studied U.S. intellectual history at Radcliffe College and city planning at Yale University. She is survived by her brother Sheafe Satterthwaite of Salem, NY, for decades an American landscape historian at Williams College.

Ann Satterthwaite's spirited personality and keen intellect will be remembered by her large community of friends and by the legacy of the numerous vibrant parks and green civic spaces she championed for all. A celebration of her life will be held at 12:30 p.m. Sunday, November 9, at Grace Episcopal Church, 1041 Wisconsin Ave., NW, Washington, DC.

Kindly send any memorial contributions to Friends of Georgetown Waterfront Park, P.O. Box 3653, Washington, DC, 20027, or via their website.